Did you know that the Narragansett brewery survived prohibition by brewing and bottling beer for medinical purposes? It's true. They even had permission from the IRS. Which reminded us that yesterday, April 7th, marks the 77th anniversary of the Cullen-Harrison Act. Passed in 1933, the law authorized the first legal beer sales since October of 1919. Now go grab a ’Gansett and make a toast to that!
The Cullen-Harrison Act, signed by President Franklin Roosevelt on March 22, 1933, authorized the sale of 3.2% beer (thought to be too low an alcohol concentration to be intoxicating) and wine, with the first legal beer sales since the beginning of Prohibition on April 7, 1933. In 1933, the state conventions ratified the Twenty-first Amendment, which repealed Amendment XVIII and prohibited only the violations of laws that individual states had in regard to "intoxicating liquors". Federal Prohibitionary laws were then repealed. The amendment was fully ratified on December 5, 1933. Some States, however, continued Prohibition within their jurisdictions. Almost two-thirds of all states adopted some form of local option which enabled residents in political subdivisions to vote for or against local Prohibition; therefore, for a time, 38% of Americans lived in areas with Prohibition. By 1966, however, all states had fully repealed their state-level Prohibition laws, with Mississippi the last state to do so.